based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …
1775 – Matthew Monk Lewis, British gothic novelist, born (d.1818); Have you ever read an 18th century Gothic romance? They are incomparably silly, overripe, and, except for their excruciatingly stilted language, great fun to read. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto started the literary vogue, and it was quickly followed by Lewis's Ambrosio, or The Monk (1795), and, in America, by the novels of Charles Brockden Brown.
The Monk is the most lurid example of the genre, and Lewis was forced to delete many passages for a second edition that were considered "scandalous," so scandalous, in fact, that Lewis's literary stock skyrocketed and he found himself lionized by high society.
The Monk combines the supernatural, the horrible, and a little bit of raw sex in its plot about Ambrosio, the Father Superior of the Capuchins of Madrid. (It is essential to the Anglo-Saxon Gothic novel that affairs of the flesh always take place in Latin climes.) Ambrosio is seduced by Matilda de Villanegas, a woman driven to blind nymphomania by demons, and who enters the monastery, and Ambrosio's bed, disguised as a boy! After he discovers that the boy is actually a woman, Ambrosio's entire character changes, and he pursues other women with the aid of magic and by murdering. His sins are found out and he is tortured by the Inquisition, finally being sentenced to death. He makes a bargain with the Devil to escape, but the Devil destroys him. It seems apparent that had the wild nympho Matilda actually been a boy, none of Ambrosio's problems would have followed.
In real life, Lewis at twenty-eight was in love with fourteen year old William Kelly a male incarnation of Matilda who brought him nothing but misery. Kelly was the ne'er-do-well son of Mrs. Isabella Kelly, an author with whom he corresponded, and to whom he offered various kinds of financial aid, among them the cost of educating her son. Lewis was involved with William for fifteen years, and though there is no proof of sexual involvement, Lewis did include the younger man in his will and speak of him always in affectionate, if frustrated terms.
The question of Lewis's "homosexuality" has been debated by his biographers, such as Summers and Peck. That Lewis was of an unconventional sexual makeup is clear in his life as well as his works.
1908 - Minor White (d.1976) was one of the most important and influential 20th Century American photographers. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on this date.
White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while working as a waiter and bartender at the University Club. In 1938, White moved to Portland, Oregon. There he began his career in photography, first joining the Oregon Camera Club, then taking on assignments from the Works Project Administration (WPA) and exhibiting at the Portland Art Museum.
After serving in military intelligence during WWII, White moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University under Meyer Schapiro and developing his own distinctive style. He became involved with a circle of influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams; hearing Stieglitz's idea of "equivalents" from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White's mature post-war work.
The "equivalents" of White were often photographs of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered mundane, but often made special by the quality of the light in which they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. However, in regard to an equivalent, the specific objects themselves are of secondary importance either to the photographer or the viewer. Instead, such a photograph captures a sentiment or emotionally symbolic idea using formal and structural elements that carry a feeling or sense of "recognition": a mirroring of something inside the viewer.
At Ansel Adams' invitation, White moved back to the West Coast to join Adams, Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham in the first American fine arts photography department which was forming at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
White co-founded the influential magazine Aperture in 1952 with fellow photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Barbara Morgan; writer/curator Nancy Newhall; and Newhall's husband, historian Beaumont Newhall. White edited the magazine until 1975.
In 1953 he moved to Rochester, New York and for four years worked as a curator at George Eastman House, and also edited their magazine Image. He taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1956 to 1964. Prominent students from this period include Paul Caponigro, Pete Turner and Jerry Uelsmann. White spent the last ten years of his life teaching at MIT where, among others, he taught Raymond Moore. In 1970 he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship.
White was a closeted bisexual man and felt tormented through much of his life by his then socially-unacceptable feelings for young men. Much of this erotic turmoil expressed itself in his post-war subject matter and style, and in his spiritual search for peace and simplicity. Several of his photographs of male nudes are considered to be the masterworks of the genre, but were only posthumously published in 1989.
1933 – Oliver Sacks (d.2015) was a British neurologist, naturalist and author who spent his professional life in the United States. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe" and therefore important to study. He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders, with some of his books adapted for stage and film.
Sacks was the author of numerous best-selling books, mostly collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders. His writings have been featured in a wide range of media. His books include a wealth of narrative detail about his experiences with patients, and how they coped with their conditions, often illuminating how the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.
Awakenings (1973), an autobiographical account of his efforts to help people with encephalitis lethargica regain proper neurological function, was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He and his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain were the subject of "Musical Minds", an episode of the PBS series Nova. In 2008, Sacks was awarded a CBE for services to literature during the Queen's Birthday Honours.
Sacks never married and lived alone for most of his life. He declined to share details from his personal life until late in his life. He addressed his homosexuality for the first time in his 2015 autobiography On the Move: A Life. During his early career he indulged in:
"staggering bouts of pharmacological experimentation, underwent a fierce regimen of bodybuilding at Muscle Beach (for a time he held a California record, after he performed a full squat with 600 pounds across his shoulders), and racked up more than 100,000 leather-clad miles on his motorcycle. And then one day he gave it all up—the drugs, the sex, the motorcycles, the bodybuilding."
On learning of her son’s sexuality, his mother exclaimed: "You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born". When he turned 40 Sacks had a week-long liaison with a Harvard student. "After that sweet birthday fling," he recalled, "I was to have no sex for the next thirty-five years."
Celibate for about 35 years after his forties, in 2008 he began a friendship with writer and New York Times contributor Bill Hayes, that evolved into a committed long-term partnership in a shared home. He noted in a 2001 interview that severe shyness — which he described as "a disease" — had been a lifelong impediment to his personal interactions.
1937 – The English artist David Hockney was born on this date (d.2026). Based in Los Angeles, California, Hockney was an important contributor to the British Pop art movement of the 1960s, and considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He settled in California during the 80's. Early in his development, Hockney exhibited a distinct crush on rockstar Cliff Richard. Richard was referenced directly and indirectly in Hockney's work. Often Hockney referred to him as 'Doll Boy' after Richard's 1958 hit single Living Doll and many early works have the letters "CR" or "DB" or the numerical representation "42" where 4 represents the D and 2 stands for the B.
Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men. His widely seen portraits of friends and lovers have handsomely played their part in breaking down entrenched resistance to the erotic gaze directed at the male body, and his brilliantly colored paintings of sun-drenched swimming pools have captured the essence of Southern California sensuality.
His work has always been critically acclaimed and he has faced no hardship in his career. Ironically, this passionate music lover is now going deaf. At the height of his craft, Hockney is in a private race against time.
In summer 1966, while teaching at UCLA he met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and drawings. He’s there in so many of David Hockney’s iconic artworks: the blurred figure snaking through the swimming pool, the nude with the intense stare in the tropical garden, the delightfully well-dressed young man in the painting. They fell in love, and moved back to London where they spent many years in the company of some of the most dazzling stars of the swinging capital. Peter collected hundreds of photgraphs of their time together before they eventually parted. Today, he resides in New York, and works as an artist creating sculptures, stonewares and ceramics, and occasionally exhibiting his now iconic photographs.
On the morning of 18 March 2013, Hockney's 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died as a result of drugs, drinking acid and alcohol at Hockney's Bridlington studio. Elliott was a first- and second-team player for Bridlington rugby club. It was reported that Hockney's ex-partner John Fitzherbert drove Elliott to Scarborough General Hospital where he later died.
Hockney was offered a knighthood in 1990, but he declined the offer.
1985 – DeRay Mckesson is an American civil rights activist, podcaster, and former school administrator. An early supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, he has been active in the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland and on social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram.
Mckesson has also written for HuffPost and The Guardian.
Along with Johnetta Elzie, Brittany Packnett, and Samuel Sinyangwe, Mckesson launched Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. He is currently part of Crooked Media and hosts Pod Save the People.
In late 2015, he was a guest lecturer at Yale Divinity School. In November of the same year, Mckesson spoke at the GLAAD Gala, where he discussed his life as a gay man and asked LGBT people to "come out of the quiet."
On February 3, 2016, Mckesson announced his candidacy in the 2016 Baltimore mayoral election. He finished with 3,445 votes (2.6%) placing sixth in the Democratic Party primary on April 26.
Mckesson is the author of On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope, a memoir about his life and time as a Black Lives Matter organizer.
1992 – Jeremy Pope is an American actor and singer born on this date. Pope is the sixth person in Tony Award history tonominated in two categories for separate performances during the same year, when he received nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for his role as "Pharus Jonathan Young" in Choir Boy and Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical for his role as Eddie Kendricks in Ain't Too Proud in 2019, the latter of which also earned him a nomination for a 2020 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
In 2020, Pope starred in the Netflix miniseries Hollywood, which earned him a nomination for a 2020 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Leading Role in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. His most recent work is as the young gay man who joins the Marines in the film The Inspection based on a book by Elegance Bratton.
snowghoul
titsay
gummygunk
origamiaround
romaincrisis
jacobvanloon